In Barrington, a woman's own Eden, deep in a summer day

BARRINGTON, R.I. — The garden is exotic and wild, a jungle in the middle of a suburban cul-de-sac. It is fantastical, like something from a storybook, “The Secret Garden” or some such children’s tale.

Alex Kuffner Journal Staff Writer kuffneralex

BARRINGTON, R.I. — The garden is exotic and wild, a jungle in the middle of a suburban cul-de-sac. It is fantastical, like something from a storybook, “The Secret Garden” or some such children’s tale.

Trees line the front. Paper-bark maple, weeping cherry, Southern magnolia, stewartia. The ground below is dense with hostas, ferns and vinca that grow around lichen-coated stones as large and flat as table tops. Wild begonias, fuchsias and hydrangeas burst with color.

There is not a blade of grass in sight, unless you count the mounds of Japanese forest grass with their variegated tresses of yellow and green that spill over a low stone wall facing the street.

Peer through the verdant tangle and you may see JoAnn Putnam-Scholes at work, transplanting a sedum or placing a chunk of granite just so, a sculpture nestled in the flora.

This is her Eden, a creation four decades in the making but still incomplete.

A few years ago, by chance, I walked by Putnam-Scholes’ house with my dogs. Almost every day afterward, I made sure our walks took us there.

I would peer over the bamboo gate at the side of the yard to steal a glimpse of the pea-stone path that snaked behind the house and wonder what other strange plants were back there.

During one of my intrusions, Putnam-Scholes was in the garden. We started talking, no doubt she flashed her toothy smile, and she opened the gate to us.

The garden is in a neighborhood called Country Club plat, a name that evokes all the tired stereotypes of this town: stuffy, stodgy, stiff.

But Country Club plat isn’t really some swank enclave. The middle-class neighborhood, nestled between the Barrington River and the town center, gets its name from the public nine-hole golf course to which it was home that it was home to in the 1920s and ’30s. The course closed after the Hurricane of ’38, and the land was divided into house lots.

Putnam-Scholes and her husband, Robert Scholes, live in the former clubhouse, an imposing three-story structure that dates to 1847. The house is largely hidden these days by the dense garden, but when the couple bought it in 1972, the only things growing were a few mountain laurels and a Norway maple.

Putnam-Scholes, ever positive, was undeterred. She has always been a gardener, learning from her mother and aunts during a childhood in New Orleans and devouring the plant encyclopedia they gave her.

She can still picture the beauty of the magnolias in bloom during college exams in New Orleans when she was in her 20s.

“It was heaven,” she says.

She recalls the house in Providence that she lived in with her first husband and their four children when she was in her 30s. It was a tough time, she says. The house had no yard.

“I planted along the curb because I needed some garden in my life.”

And she describes the relief of moving into the house in Wwest Barrington that sat on a half-acre half an acre and was surrounded by raspberry bushes and apple and pear trees.

“I would send my kids out every day to collect fruit.”

One of the first things Putnam-Scholes did after she and Scholes — her second husband, an English professor at Brown University (now retired) — moved into the home in Country Club plat was order manure. She had a truckload dumped out front. The neighbors weren’t happy, but she was ecstatic when she started digging and found earthworms in the garden where there were none before.

She planted magnolias and camellias that reminded her of her youth down South. She planted a bog garden with carnivorous pitcher plants because she thought it would be fun. She planted bamboo and bletilla, a type of ground orchid, weeping blue atlas cedar and and hinoki cypress and trifoliate orange, a citrus tree with thorns that one plant catalog compared to dragon claws.

“It had a warning not to plant it near a path,” Putnam-Scholes says with glee.

And she accented the plantings with things she found in antique stores and junk shops, a hodgepodge of old iron gears and wheels, boat cleats and sundials, a collection of electrical insulators. An anchor rests in one corner. And nearby, shoe molds are lined up like footsteps under a salvaged ironwood gate.

“I stuff everything in here,” she says. “I can’t let it alone.”

Putnam-Scholes is democratic in her love of plants. She has planted thousands.

“When this is in bloom, it’s my favorite,” she says pointing to a type of daphne that has fluffy pink flowers.

“And when this is in bloom,” she says walking over to a magnolia with softball-sized flowers, “I want to linger under it.”

Putnam-Scholes will be 80 in a few months. She is long retired from her job as a biology teacher at Barrington High. But she still works in the garden nearly every day this time of year.

“It’s the surprises in the garden that are such a treat,” she says. “Getting a whiff of mint or finding a great big nightcrawler.”

Putnam-Scholes’ garden is whimsical, but that doesn’t mean it’s is unkempt. She is meticulous in her way.

A careful observer will see the frequent changes that she makes. A maple sapling planted within a ring of rocks found on the banks of the Sakonnet River in Tiverton. An old finial, perhaps from a favorite antique shop in Warren, propped up among a patch of green-and-red hens and chicks.

It’s why I take my dogs by the garden whenever I can. This town I call home still surprises.